At a quarter past midnight when I was just about to go to bed, I noticed Nysse in my bedroom, which is unusual for him, and behaving oddly on top of that.

A closer look showed the reason: he was playing with a mouse that he had brought inside.

The mouse was physically unharmed, but probably panicking, of course. Nysse wanted to play and sort of softly batted the mouse about, not particularly aggressively at all. The mouse tried to flee a few times, but mostly stayed as still as possible. At one point it ran into the folds of my morning robe and Nysse, who had been looking the other way, basically lost him.

I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a plastic jar with a lid, hoping desperately to get back before Nysse lets the mouse flee again and it goes into hiding under my bed or something like that. Ran back again and saw the mouse in relative safety in the corner of the room, in a freeze response. It didn’t even react when I put the jar over it – like I’d do with a wasp or a spider – and slid the lid underneath. Easier than catching a wasp, actually.

Snapped a quick photo and released it into the garden. Then threw Nysse out as well a couple of minutes later, because he was still in a hunting mood and was running around and looking for things to attack. By that time the mouse seemed to have disappeared.

I was going to sit there to eat my dinner. I guess that spot was nice and warm for him.

I sometimes envy Nysse his absolute relaxation.

Also: I notice that I can no longer distinguish the part of his tail that was shaved.

Ingrid is home for a whole ten days. It’s not a week of leave but a week of theoretical studies at home – a 500-page dense brick of a book about “Soldiership in the field” (which you can actually get as a free PDF online), a thinner one about anti-tank grenade launchers, another about working as a security guard at restricted-access sites.

It’s not a week of leave, but at least she can get home-cooked food and pet a cat while studying.

A single dose of analgesic was enough to make a visible difference in Nysse. Two more daily doses and he’s back to normal. Eating three full portions of food and asking for more in between; going out for hours; looking relaxed while he sleeps. While he was in pain, it looked like he could never quite relax: even when he was resting, he didn’t dissolve into a puddle of cat. That turned-up chin and upside-down head is the clearest sign of deep relaxation.

Nysse still seems unwell. No appetite, no energy. With the wound on his ear looking all healed, something else must be going on. The online vet service guided me through inspecting all of Nysse’s body for invisible damage, and we found out that his tail is somehow hurt. Today I got an emergency appointment at a local vet clinic. They confirmed damage to the tail, but couldn’t see through his thick fur if there was an actual wound or not.

Off with the fur, then! Luckily there was no wound hiding under the fur, so maybe there’s “just” some internal damage. (Nothing too serious, because he is using and moving his tail quite normally.) Might be this isn’t even related to the fight he had, just coincidental timing. Anyway, he came home with a naked tail and a prescription for painkillers. Hopefully that will get him on track to heal.

The vet was going to tidy up the haircut, but Nysse wouldn’t have any more of that, so this is what he gets to live with.

The fight that Nysse had last week left him with a jagged wound in his right ear. Those ears are like a record of his battles. The tips of both are a bit ragged, one is split at the end, but this is the largest wound yet. I’ve been a bit worried – he hasn’t quite had the same appetite and energy as he usually does. The wound doesn’t look infected, and he doesn’t have a fever, and he is still eating and going out, so hopefully he just feels a bit off. My pet insurance company offers free online consultations with a vet, and they confirmed that all seems OK, so I guess I’ll just keep him under close observation.

I wish he could just stop fighting – but if the neighbours’ cat is trying to claim that our yard is now part of his territory, I can understand that Nysse won’t accept that.

Nysse has a deep-seated rivalry with one of the neighbour cats. I think there is severe disagreement about territory. The other cat, who moved here relatively recently, seems to think that our garden is part of his territory, while Nysse of course does not agree.

They stand face to face and yowl at each other. Sometimes they swipe at each other; that’s when I think Nysse comes home with loose tufts of fur.

This morning they had a stand-off in the other cat’s yard, just across the street, loudly enough that I heard it through closed doors and windows while I was sitting at my work desk. I poked my head out to see what was going on, and saw the man in the house do the same through his front door.

Things must have escalated. Fifteen minutes later, Nysse came in, dripping blood on the floor from a ragged wound in one of his ears, and a dozen tufts of fur sticking out all over his torso. I had to wash it out in the bathroom, which didn’t make him any happier.

On the one hand I hope he won over the other cat, so that maybe he can have more peace in our yard without someone else muscling in. On the other hand, of course, I don’t want any cat to be hurt. I do wish they could just ignore each other. But if some stranger suddenly started hanging out in my garden and saying “it’s theirs now”, I wouldn’t give up without a fight either.

Here’s a photo of an earlier stand-off, from a couple of weeks ago, before the snow came.

Boatloads of snow.

Nysse doesn’t have a litterbox (I decommissioned the one we had when he hadn’t touched it in months) and does his business outside. In this weather, he walked a few metres away from the stairs, dug a little hole in the snow, covered it up with more snow, and came straight back inside.

It’s not particularly cold, even. Just very, very snowy.